An avid, amateur historian, I have traveled extensively across many states visiting, studying, and photographing historic sites.
USA
Joined May 2025
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The South Carolina Gamecocks are named after a Revolutionary War general the British couldn’t catch.
In 1780, the British captured Charleston and seemed to have South Carolina beaten. Thomas Sumter, a retired militia officer, was out of the war until the British burned his plantation.
Sumter raised his own band of backcountry fighters and went to war. He was a master at guerrilla warfare. He raided, ambushed, struck British outposts. Then vanished, again and again.
According to tradition, the British gave him his nickname, saying he fought like a gamecock, the fighting rooster that never quits.
At Blackstock’s Farm in November 1780, he fended off Banastre Tarleton himself.
The name stuck. Around 1900, a Columbia newspaper started calling the University of South Carolina’s football team the Gamecocks after him and it became official.
The university carries on his legacy every Saturday on the football field.
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Dixie Sledge Guards!
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45th Infantry Regiment was organized at Auburn, Alabama, in may, 1862. Companies that made up the unit were from the counties of Barbour, Randolph, Lowndes, Macon, and Russell. It was immediately sent to Mississippi and at Tupelo suffered from camp diseases. Later it moved to Kentucky, fought at Perryville under General Walthall, then was assigned to General Wood's, Lowrey's, and Shelley's Brigade, Army of Tennessee. The 45th participated in the difficult campaigns of the army from Murfreesboro to Atlanta, was with Hood in Tennessee, and ended the war in North Carolina. It was organized with 750 men, reported 91 casualties at Murfreesboro and 117 at Chickamauga, and totalled 366 effectives and 309 arms in December, 1863. The regiment lost 27 killed, 72 wounded, and 32 missing at the Battle of Atlanta and was almost annihilated at Franklin. Only a remnant surrendered on April 26, 1865. The field officers were Colonels Ephraim B. Breedlove, James G. Gilchrist, William S. Goodwyn, and Harris D. Lampley; Lieutenant Colonel Robert H. Abercrombie; and Major George C. Freeman.
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Woe be unto the stag who, emerging from yonder wood, is spotted with a blue kepi between his brow tines!
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Civil War veterans of both sides gather to take a picture under their colors in July 1913 during the Great Reunion, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.
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"General J.B. Gordon at Gettysburg, July 1, 1863," Don Troiani
This painting to me probably most represents the Unreconstructed Spirit. I can still remember seeing it the first time.
I always believed one day we would rally and march out from the wilderness again against our enemies and turn the world upside down.
That hour is now.
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Major Charles Russell, chief quartermaster on the staff of General Bee at Ft Brown, Brownsville, Texas May 16, 1863. This was, at the time, the primary artery of foreign trade with the Confederacy. Everything went through Matamoros to Bagdad on the Mexican coast.
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A Kansas volunteer drew this picture of his own capture by Confederate troops under General Sterling Price during his 1864 raid into Missouri. This was the last major southern offensive west of the Mississippi before the end of the war.
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Today in 1811, in the climax of Tecumseh's War, US troops led by General (& future President) William Henry Harrison won a decisive victory over Tecumseh’s Confederacy at the Battle of Tippecanoe near present-day Battle Ground, Indiana, USA. 🇺🇸
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On this day in 1863, 21-year-old Confederate private Sam Davis was offered his life if he would simply name the man who gave him intelligence on Union movements.
His reply:
“I am only a private soldier in the Confederate Army. The man who gave me this information is worth ten thousand more to the Confederate cause than I am. I would sooner die a thousand deaths than betray a friend or be false to my duty.”
He was hanged that same day.
Duty over survival. Honor over self-preservation.
#SamDavis #November7 #SouthernHonor #DutyOverSelf
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25 March 1781
General Lafayette to General Washington…
Lafayette advises General Washington that he believes that he is getting intelligence information faster through Williamsburg than going through Suffolk, Virginia, because of “ships in Hampton Road.”
For those of us including me who didn’t know, according to Britannica online, Hampton Roads is a “great natural roadstead in southeastern Virginia, formed by the deep-water estuary of the James River, protected by the Virginia Peninsula. The Nansemond and Elizabeth rivers also enter the roadstead, which is connected to the Chesapeake Bay by the Thimble Shoal Channel.” [britannica.com/place/Hampton…]. From the map, it definitely looks like a faster way to get mail north than going around to Suffolk.
Lafayette advises that he had not heard of the French Fleet until he received some intelligence information from the day before. He assures General Washington that they [the French] “have put it out of doubt that they have done their best to endeavor towards the cooperation [of this cause] and … [that] your Excellency may depend upon their veracity.”
The following is the description of the battle from the information that Lafayette received on the 24th:
“On the sixteenth instant, both fleets [French and British] fell in near [the] Capes with each other. They both consisted of eight ships of the Line, fifties included, with the difference of twenty guns in favor of the enemy. Each ship of the line and each frigate singly engaged a partner, and the action lasted during three glasses [about one and half hours]. The enemy had two 74 much worsted (one of them had 65 men killed).
“The “London” suffered in her rigging, and the British fleet sheered off for [the] Chesapeake while the French stood in a line formed in good order. The enemy have sent their wounded up to Portsmouth, taken all the sailors and marines at that place and refitted their damaged ships. They were also reinforced from Portsmouth by the “Charm”, a 44 that can be made a fifty, and two large frigates.
“But it appears that our allies are determined to carry the Point, and that the addition to the British force has not prevented them from appearing near the Capes. Last morning the whole British fleet with the reinforcements went to sea, and about eleven o’clock we heard a furious cannonade which lasted more than three hours.
“The action must have been bloody and obstinate. Upon its event, depends the fate of our expedition. I wish it had been in my power not to make your Excellency a part of our anxiety until I might have known on what side Victory has been [laid]. But the fresh winds that blew last night make it impossible to have any account this morning.”
Lafayette finishes with some “housekeeping” issues, including that “Arnold be circumscribed within his works on both sides of the Dismal Swamp. The water is still opened to him, but every armed vessel in the rivers is getting ready to do what little service can be expected from them. The detachment at Annapolis is also ordered to be in the most perfect readiness.”
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ALT ship-capture-of-ardent-by-french-auguste-louis-de-rossel-de-cercy-cape-henry.webp
ALT Marquis Of De La Fayette, By Joseph-Desire Court, 1834.jpg
ALT George Washington AI Generated - FB.jpg
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Today in 1861, in Belmont, Missouri, Union forces led by General Ulysses S. Grant overran a Confederate camp but was soon forced to retreat when Confederate reinforcements arrived under the fighting bishop General Leonidas Polk.
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Charleston Pattern Battle Flag
The notable feature of these designs is the inclusion of a blue mounting. These colors were utilized by many units within the Department of South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia, along with various South Carolina units transferred to the armies of the Confederacy. The specific one copied for use here was carried by the 27th South Carolina.
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During the War Between the States, George Armstrong Custer had seven of John Singleton Mosby’s men hanged. In retaliation, Mosby had seven of Custer’s men that he had captured draw lots for one of them to be hanged.
But he found out that the one who had drawn the lot to be hanged was a drummer boy, aged 16, who had never carried a weapon so, instead, "The Gray Ghost" pardoned him.
Many years after the war, in 1908, an old man in his sixties called on Mosby at his home and presented him with a cane bearing a silver plate inscribed, “To Colonel John S. Mosby, with the profound regards of James A. Daley, the drummer boy, captured by Mosby’s command near Newton, Virginia." Mosby used that cane until his death on Memorial Day in 1916, at the age of 83.
Now you know the rest of the story!
